The people who maintain the unofficial site would have, at some point, used their CTRL and C keys followed not immediately, but closely by, their CTRL and V keys.
But that is copyright infringement. You're not allowed to copy some work, modify it, then slap the original copyright on it. This is an illegal website, prone to being taken down by AWS.
Yes mate, Internet Police Officer Jeff Bezos has been dispatched and will take this illegal website down right away.
(Using copyrighted material is permitted under fair use; this website is a parody. I’m not a lawyer but at some level preserving the copyright notice is probably better than claiming it as their own.)
This website is not a parody, and fair use does NOT permit you to retain the original copyright notice on the derived work.
You may say that the original work is copyright of the respective owners and that this is a parody work. But that's not what the site is doing. The footer contains the original, unaltered copyright, creating confusion as to who owns the derived work. Amazon does not own this, nor do they endorse it, so you're not allowed to say it's copyrighted by Amazon.
Let them sue. I see the headline now, "Amazon sues status page website for accurately reporting on outages". Followed by lots of people hosting mirrors to stop.lying.cloud and saying things like "We are all stop.lying.cloud now"
I have a legally sound case to divorce my wife (anyone does, you can divorce for no reason), however she need not worry as that would be colossally stupid on my part. The same goes here.
Nope. Because these laws also protect people who make such websites from the corporations they're commenting on, too. The respect must be mutual, else e.g. OSS has no basis for legal protection, either.
Being concerned for the proper respect of IP laws is something that benefits everyone.
You make more friends defending humans from big companies than you do defending big companies from humans.
Your argument would have a small amount of merit if you acknowledged that the laws DO NOT protect people like they do corporations. That is a hollow ideal, not reality.
I don't really see your point. My original comment was more pointing out that the operators, if not Amazon, could be seen as infringing their rights. They should update their legalese if they want to be truly protected. How is that defending Amazon?
Regardless of your pointed comment, I'm operating in the land of legal objectivity. The law doesn't care about your feelings much.
> Your argument is that IP law should be equally observed by everyone because it protects individuals and corporations alike
That is a weird understanding of what I said, and I don't really think you're arguing in good faith here. There's a lot of bias so I am choosing to not further this conversation.
Fair use is not a right. It’s a defense. When you are sued for copyright infringement, you have to argue that you’re doing it in fair use. It’s not the “get out of jail free” card people think it is.
That's warped view of the world. A corporation can always take you to court and harass the crap out of you, the court will side with your defense because you were right and claimant was wrong, you had the right to do what you did.
Actually, having a satire site taken down over copyright is one of the best ways to extort large amounts of money from the copyright holder, because constitutional attorneys will seep from the floorboards and appear in your shower trying to be an attorney on that case. Satire is extremely protected speech.
Satire is the loophole of Copyright. If you satire ANYTHING you can use their copyrights in the satire. One could safely and legally drive an entire nation's transportation industry thru that loophole.
No, fair use does NOT allow you to retain the original copyright. That would be passing off a derived work as the original copyright holder's work, which could be very damaging. This is a violation of fair use, if it could even be considered that to begin with.
Fair use in the case of satire is not retaining the original copyright, it is referencing the copyright. It is a legal split hair, but it stands in court.
I think you misunderstand. The website in question has "Copyright (c) Amazon, Inc" in the bottom, when in fact the derived work (the site) is not created by Amazon, but by a third party. IANAL but my understanding is that this copyright notice being retained without any clarification of the owner of the derived work can be seen as endorsement, which is an infringement of copyright unless Amazon has expressly permitted such use (which is usually indicated as such, anyway).
It is also clearly not satire. That would not hold up in court, and there are many instances where they have tried that angle and failed.
No, it's not a trademark issue. They copied the work verbatim (including code, which is not covered by trademark law, but by copyright law), modified it, and then put the original copyright notice in the legalese. This is copyright infringement.
And consumers are clearly deceived - hence why my original comment asking about it was written and has several upvotes.
The direct copyright is covered by the satire exceptions. If you want to argue that copying the legalese is different, it's going to be on those confusion grounds, which IIUC aren't a copyright concern.
Amazon has taken down trivial things before. This is a dangerous assumption to make - "it's not important to them so I shouldn't worry about the law". Those are famous last words.
